


seeds of darkness planted in you

by spacemagic



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi, Star Wars: Rebellion Era - All Media Types, Star Wars: Rebels, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, And I bet that this has become completely impossible following it, Gen, I still haven't watched the Rebels finale, Sith Ahsoka, Sith!soka, Still, dark side Ahsoka
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-31
Updated: 2016-03-31
Packaged: 2018-05-30 03:25:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,990
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6406723
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacemagic/pseuds/spacemagic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>There's a wildness to you, little one.</em>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Seven days following the success at the battle of Endor, as the Rebellion gets to work reclaiming former Imperial territory, Leia Organa discovers an hidden imperial outpost on Yavin IV with thirty-eight dead bodies massacred inside. There is only one survivor: a prisoner, one togruta woman with yellow eyes, trapped in an isolation cell, delirious and half-starved, whose identification documents have been completely wiped off all the records. </p><p>She looks at her in the eye:</p><p>‘I want to know, first and foremost, whether you have had any prior association with Darth Vader.’</p>
            </blockquote>





	seeds of darkness planted in you

The interrogation room is bright. The light doesn't flicker. Stale walls in white, and no windows. You cannot smell the swelter of the jungle from inside, or feel the metal exterior of the hidden compound slowly rust and crumble as it falls into wilderness.  

The imperial detainee – a term far too _bureaucrati_ c for her tastes, really – was found alive, delirious, after having been locked in an isolation cell for an unknown quantity of time. The limp bodies of twenty-six storm troopers, five imperial officers, and seven other political prisoners – the including two former senate representatives from Naboo –  were littered across the compound. Three disabled assassin droids were found outside of her cell, each one decapitated. No one else was alive.

No burns. No blood. No scorch marks from blaster fire.

General Leia Organa, with a curt nod, moved to sit opposite the ‘detainee’. Togruta. Female. Thirty-five to forty years of age. Someone might as well have cut her features with a penknife; her face was made of sharp, decisive lines around a pair of wide eyes and long lips that remained tightly shut. Her scarred lekku trailed long past her waist. Her hands lay flat on the table: bruised knuckles and rough skin.

The initial data on her is scant. She has no citizen ID code, no public records. Her profile had been analysed by several databases with no direct matches. Likely the result of Imperial tampering. Backdated cross-referencing with a brief profile and an approximate facial scan pointed to multiple anonymous requests for information – through pirate information broker records, mostly – connected to an increasingly violent series of historical events in the Outer Rim. The second revolution and counter-revolution of Onderon. Several high profile assassinations on Nar Shaddaa. Nal Hutta’s most recent coup. The genocide of the Zygerian people.

The last result chilled her. That slaughter had led to the death of sixty thousand people and counting.  

'I'll be blunt,’ Leia says, after a long pause. ‘This will be much easier if you decide to co-operate today. For both of us.'

She said nothing in response. As expected.

‘I understand that your experiences here have been traumatic. And I don’t blame you if you resent the fact that you’re still held under custody here. But we’re not Imperials – we’re not _sadists_. We don’t want to hurt you. We do, however, need to clarify the exact details of the situation before we can continue – or else we compromise the security of the whole operation. And I cannot allow that.’

What Leia had not expected was that they already _had_ data on her from over five years ago. A deleted profile. An incomplete dossier locked behind the highest possible security classification which she couldn’t access without waiting weeks for clearance from Mon Mothma _personally_. All Leia had on her right now was a name: Fulcrum.

She’d heard of Fulcrum.

Strange. She’d never thought they would meet like this.

‘I'm talking to you today because we initially discovered this compound with its all security protocols intact,’ continued Leia, recapping the situation. ‘We’ve detected signs of struggle but someone managed to hot-wire the security system as to not trigger a base-wide alarm. Meaning there could be another person involved in this mess.’

Fulcrum. The Phoenix Squadron co-founder had been declared M.I.A. half a decade ago when the Executor had fired on their hidden base. Half the fleet had been wiped out with her; Fulcrum had been presumed dead with her comrades-in-arms.

Leia could scarcely believe she was alive. The woman opposite her did not look like a former alliance agent, a decorated soldier and a whispered name. The woman opposite her, who did not speak, who did not do so much as twitch at Leia’s carefully-worded statements, whose fierce yellow eyes remained fixed on Leia at all times – she looked like a predator. She scowled at Leia.

‘We’re not accusing you of foul play,' she found herself adding. 'We just want to piece this puzzle together and get out of here. That means asking hard questions about your loyalties.’

This was the other quandary. Whereas the other ‘detainees’ in the compound were imperial loyalists – imperial loyalists with multiple conflicting interests, but nonetheless, _loyalists._ Their political profiles didn’t compare to a _missing agent of one of the founding rebellion cells._

Her capture here made little sense unless they hadn’t known her actual identity. Which was plausible. They had been much more careful then. Which meant her capture was an unlucky accident – or orchestrated for some unknown purpose. Perhaps there was useful intel buried in this abandoned outpost after all.

Leia was sceptical. The woman sat opposite her, made out of battle scars and old war stories, couldn’t possibly inflict that sort of damage onto herself for political piecemeal. To trap herself in isolation for days – with so little food, or water, or chance of _escape._

'I want to begin by clarifying your association with the Imperials. Including all Imperial forces stationed here, including the ISB and the Imperial Navy.' continued Leia.

This could quite simply be a case of botched inter-imperial politicking, covert ‘off-the-record’ operations designed to uproot the closest possible competition in pursuit of a promotion or a self-serving agenda – ending in disaster, on this occasion. How wasteful. How _pathetic._

If that were the case, Leia doubted Fulcrum was involved: most likely, she was caught in the crossfire, and patient questioning would confirm her ignorance and the resulting lack of compliance due to trauma. Stars, Leia knows how much of a state she’d be in if she’d gone through the same thing. Kicking and screaming and almost feral.

It didn’t explain the lack of blaster fire scorching on the walls or the bodies, though. Or the fact nobody had been on injured by anything resembling a blade or a riflebutt at all despite the fact all troopers on the premises were trained in both forms of combat. It didn’t explain the _eerily mythical_ circumstances surrounding these deaths.

It didn’t explain how she fought a full-scale assault by the Imperial Navy’s finest warship and survived in one piece.

It didn’t explain a tier six security classification for a field agent that had disappeared in mysterious circumstances over five years ago. Tier six security indicated exactly

Leia carefully placed her hands together. She looked at Fulcrum in the eye.

‘I want to know, first and foremost, whether you have had any prior association with Darth Vader.’

 

* * *

 

In the gardens, she could hardly breathe. It was once full of small, delicate flowers, the sort that sat on delicately trimmed lawns that a senator would purchase in a sky-level allotment on Coruscant. They had taught her to how to visualise. Not as a padawan: but a child. Meditation was harsh and empty and as cold as the distance between stars and as children they taught you how to garden your mind instead. How to bury seeds. How to rake the dirt so not to soil your hands. How to prune yourself neatly.

She felt her breath hitch. Her fingers wandered along a trellis, cut apart. The sun filtered through a skylight. A single crow watched them move. Forget-Me-Nots.

Her garden was full of half-forgotten flowers now, wilder than the day she decided she couldn’t keep cutting it apart. The grass grew long with little daisies she plucked as she passed, she couldn't last, she thought, without the brambles and the wildflowers, the purple heather thick across the moors where the air soared past her and whistled songs she’d thought forgotten about how he hadn’t been a gardener, how he hadn’t even owned a packet of seeds – he hadn’t owned anything but the bruised skin on his hands that skimmed the water and brushed the wind and grasped her wrist and urged her: ‘come with me.’

He had taught her how to survive outside the shadows of quiet temples and gardens. He had taught her how to sleep with the sound of blaster fire jammed inside your skull (pew pew pew). How to catch the sky as it falls down. How to let your heart soar out of its cage. How to breathe whilst you’re drowning (in an ocean of black, twisted thorns (which you couldn’t keep cutting apart (not without breaking yourself.)))

 _There is a wildness to you, young one_. And he had seen it, taken it, told her to embrace it, to love it (to hate what it could do and bring). ‘Reckless’, he had first said to her, over a thousand battles ago. ‘Mine’.

Vader had no garden either. But Vader did not own _things_ : no items, no people, no purpose, nothing but his actions that he carried on his shoulders. Vader was a construct; physically and conceptually, he was a machine designed for an exact purpose _._ Machines did not possess but _were_ possessed. Machines were tools. Property. He was the idea, the sentiment behind a black, threatening mask that glared out from the ripped edge of a propaganda poster – _fight for your galaxy._ Whatever remained of the actual person behind the mask was of no utility to anyone, and effectively, could have been anyone. Or no one. It could have been no one.

It ought to have been no one. From her own point of view.

 

* * *

 

 

‘No association.’

Leia blinked. ‘I find that quite difficult to believe.’

‘Absolutely no association.’

‘His flagship had attacked your base at the time of your disappearance. We had assumed he’d slaughtered your regiment. I thought you might have met him.’

‘ _My_ base?’

She sounded almost amused. This was getting frustrating.

‘Your base, Fulcrum. You haven’t forgotten, have you?’

Fulcrum offered her a deathly glare. And then half a smirk. ‘How long,’ she said, leaning back, moving to cross her arms, ‘exactly, have you have been at war?’

‘The Alliance has been fighting since the fall of the Republic.’

‘I mean you. Specifically, you.’

‘You’re dodging the original question.’

She snorted at this. And then leant forward. ‘You know, war is something most of us want to forget.’

‘I’m not ‘most people’,’ Leia said.

‘Good.’

She wasn’t talking this seriously at all. Was she? It was difficult to tell, she wasn’t easy to read. Leia had to stop herself shaking her head – _approval,_ of all the things…

‘I’ve been fighting for the Rebel Alliance since I was thirteen,’ said Leia.

‘Then, if you’ve been in the Alliance as long as you claim, you’ll know Vader isn’t someone you exactly ‘associate’ with,’ said Fulcrum. ‘He comes in. He slaughters. He leaves. He exists for exactly two reasons: to cause fear and to cause harm. I don’t _know_ Vader. _Nobody_ knows Vader. He just _is_.’

‘Have you met Vader?’

Fulcrum said nothing.

‘Specify,’ said Leia.

‘Twenty-five years ago.'

‘That’s _impossible_.’

‘No it isn’t. What, did you know the guy personally?’

Leia paused.

‘You know he’s dead.’

Fulcrum said nothing.

'You knew him. And you know he's dead.'

Fulcrum said nothing.

'Speak to me. Fulcrum. Did you know him?'

Fulcrum stood up, and kicked the chair into the wall. She glared, long and hard.

‘Vader is an idea. You can’t kill an idea. Not like that,’ she said, quietly. ‘An idea. A concept. A construction.’

She moved around the table, her fingers trailing across the surface, closer to Leia. 'And He’s _definitely_ coming back,' she said, continuing. 'Just you wait. A different face; the same mask. And you’ll never stop fighting him this way. You’ll spend your whole life fighting him if you want to kill Vader.’

‘You knew _the person behind_ Vader was dead.’

Fulcrum stopped speaking.

She looked away for the first time since Leia sat down.

‘You know,’ she said, trying to smile. ‘I’ve been fighting since I was thirteen too.’

And then her sharp, yellow eyes flicked back onto Leia. They seemed to burn alive, and yet... she looked so tired. So, so very tired.

'You have all of his fire,' said Fulcrum, with a smile.

**Author's Note:**

> Ahsoka is referring to Mortis when she says 'twenty-five years ago'. Vader was 46 when he died, which'd make Ahsoka 40, and ~16 during season 3 or so. Close enough to twenty-five. I think I have the timelines correct? Anyway.
> 
> She's not really obviously dark here but ~ oh well ~. I might add a second chapter which delves into the specifics. I just wanted this out before today tbh.


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